Misunderstanding the Tea Party

The Tea Party movement is a political Andromeda Strain to the media, a baffling outbreak of viral unhappiness which has thus far defied every attempt at diagnosis. This is unsurprising, since the media has little interest in listening to what the Tea Party is actually saying. Instead, they attempt to stuff this remarkable grassroots movement into a variety of scary costumes, so they can be conveniently dismissed.

The most common of these costumes is a straitjacket. The media likes to view the Tea Party as a psychotic break with establishment reality. Writing in the L.A. Times, Gregory Rodriguez calls American distrust of government “neurotic – irrational, defensive, and born of emotional trauma.” He prescribes a dose of past-life regression therapy, until we get back to “our national birth trauma, our violent revolt against our ‘father’, King George III, which gave us our independence in the first place.” Wow, people named George cast really long shadows over history, don’t they?

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If the buckles on the straitjacket break, certain elements of the Left are quick to dress the Tea Party in white sheets. The tedious Joe Queenan, working for a Guardian U.K. that evidently couldn’t afford to hire an American writer who has actually seen a Tea Party rally, describes the attendees as “smallish, grassroots, inbred” anti-intellectual pasty-white Nixon voters. He also can’t stress enough how white these abhorrent, pasty-white, “ethnically monochromatic” white crackers are. Oh, and they’re also a small fringe movement that likes to send tiny squads of loudmouths to intimidate rural Idaho congressmen… but they’re also a vast, sinister, potentially violent mob, lurking in the deep red shadows of flyover country, where people have forgotten how to properly appreciate their massive central government.